As part of its quest to run races in every tinpot dictatorship in the world, MotoGP has announced a new race in Kazakhstan from 2023. This adds to the existing list of races in resource-rich, undemocratic oligarchies such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United States. In this article we investigate the history and culture of Kazakhstan.
Where?
Kazakhstan is a former Soviet republic that sits on the southern border of Russia. It also borders China and various of the other “Stans”. It’s an enormous country with just 19 million people spread over more than a million square miles. This makes it almost as empty as a football stadium hosting “An Evening With Bradley Smith”. Despite its low population density, there’s a lot of money kicking about due to its huge oil and gas reserves.
Does it have a motorcycle racing heritage?
Nope.
However, there is now a motorcycle factory that builds its machines in Kazakhstan after moving from Russia in a deal that was totally about growing Kazakh industry and in no way a dodgy exercise in avoiding sanctions.
How about sports in general?
Kazakhstan has had some success in boxing and weightlifting, with a few other random sports stars emerging from time to time. This year the country scored a great success in tennis when Elena Rybakina became the first Kazakh woman to win Wimbledon. She is a very talented Russian who was given a sack of oil money and a Kazakh passport in return for representing Kazakhstan.
Clearly Dorna found Rybakina’s win highly inspiring as they too will now be accepting a large sack of oil money in return for pretending to have any connection whatsoever with Kazakhstan.
Surely there must be some tenuous link between Kazakhstan and MotoGP?
Yes, and it’s extremely tenuous at that. Kazakhstan is mostly significant because it contains the Baikonur space port where Russia has launched most of its space rockets for over 60 years. Luckily, Kazakhstan is so empty that you can fire off a rocket and nobody even notices because the nearest neighbour is some bloke living in a tent 90 miles away who probably thought the sound was his horse farting. The Sputnik satellite was launched from Baikonur, and so was the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin.
What’s that got to do with MotoGP?
Yuri Gagarin stood at just 5 foot 2 inches in height, exactly the same as miniature MotoGP legend Dani Pedrosa. While the Americans were trying to build rockets big enough to launch a full-sized human being, the sneaky Russkis were looking for cosmonauts small enough to stuff inside an existing missile. This is exactly the same method that Ducati uses to hire its World Superbike riders.
Will there be big crowds?
Probably no more locals than you’d get at Qatar (about 8 or 9 per year), but the way things are going there might be quite a lot of Russkis who have fled across the border to escape from military conscription. So as long as there’s plenty of vodka, there could be a pretty good atmosphere.